The Tibet-India Railway

A 'Tibet-South Asia' promotion meeting for travel products was held in Lhasa on June 11.
The theme was ‘crossing Himalaya, rambling paradise in the clouds’.
China Tibet News, a Chinese website says that more than 100 travel agencies from inside or outside Tibet took part in the promotion meeting.
What was the objective of the gathering?
The website said to “show innovative idea of product design on Tibet’s travel, strengthen exchanges and communications with fellow traders, promote developmental directions of individuation, branding, and high-end quality in tourism industry, activate developmental vitality of folk travel organization, as well as expand upgrading of tourism product and profit space.”
This is fine.
A question however remains, why ‘Tibet-South Asia’?
Apart Nepal, Tibet has no ‘tourism’ contact with any ‘South Asian’ country.
Except for the Kailash-Mansarovar Yatra opened from Pittoragarh district of Uttarakhand and Nathu-la in Sikkim, there are no ‘tourist tours’ crossing over the Himalaya to Tibet or vice-versa.
During the meeting in Lhasa, some travel agencies made some major recommendations for outbound ('out of Tibet') tourism products for Nepal …and other South Asian countries.
It is there that the route to Chumbi Valley and Yatung (written Yadong by the Chinese) was mentioned.
The article said that the ‘Yatung border tour’ aroused everybody’s interest.
According to Qiao Zhifeng, director general of Yatung Tourism (under Shigatse City’s administration), the Yatung County has rich touristic resources and apparently, the local government has been keen “to exploit Yatung tourism since 2016.”
Quio explained that a three-day tour from Lhasa-Yatung has become “a very mature travel route, it also has attracted a lot of self-driving tourists and group tourists.”
He added: “In the future, we will continue to plan and develop colorful tourism products relying on abundant and superior tourism resources, and the market. At the same time, we will strive to improve the infrastructure construction of software and hardware to attract visitors from all over the world.”
'Improve the infrastructure' means 'bring the railway line to Yatung'?

Chinese tourists in India via Nathu-la?
Can the next step be to send Chinese tourists to India via Yatung and Nathu-la?
In July 2006, at the time of the opening Nathula pass for trade between India and China, Sun Yuxi, the then Chinese Ambassador in India told some journalists that Beijing planned to extend its railway linking Beijing to Tibet, to a newly opened border point in India's northeast and possibly link it to India's east coast.
Sun said "From Yadong, the Indian border area is only a few dozens of kilometers away. Then, anytime we feel the need we will link it. If the train got through all the way to Kolkata, that will be something. Lots of potential, opportunities will develop there.”
Nobody took Sun seriously then.
In July 2015, Ananth Krishnan wrote in The Daily Mail “Local officials in Yadong [Yatung] say a line running to the India border could transform the currently paltry $15million border trade, which relies on a small border market that is open from Monday to Thursday in Yatung.”
Krishnan then reported: “China has already upgraded the roads from Lhasa to Yatung. A 500km journey to the India border took Mail Today only seven hours.
Last year, in an article in the China Daily, Ma Jiali, a well-known Chinese ‘India expert’ and a researcher at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations explained that “a trans-Himalayan railway would be of great economic value as it could later connect China, the largest economy in Asia, with India, the continent's third-largest economy.”
But has India been consulted?

Surely not.
However Beijing seems decided to go ahead with the project of ‘connecting’ India.
Nepal, on its part, is more than willing to have “a convenient link to China because it believes that China's development will offer great opportunities for Nepal,” commented Jia last year (a map was then attached to the article).
It showed the train continuing its journey to Purang (Burang), near the tri-junction Nepal-Tibet-India and Yatung in the Chumbi Valley. The Purang leg will be a further step to connect Tibet and Xinjiang, through a railway line parallel to the Aksai Chin road (via the Indian territory).
The creation of Western Theater Command will make the process easier.
It would make two branches of the OBOR ending up at India’s gate.
The point is: can tourism alone justify the laying of a railway line to Yatung?
Certainly not.
The answer is somewhere else.
The raising of a Mountain Strike Corps on the other side of the pass?

A Chinese Train to Sikkim? For what?

On July 24, The Global Times run a story "Sky rail to run from Lhasa to south Tibet; further railway expansion to connect Nepal, Bhutan, India by 2020."
It announced that the railway linking Lhasa and Shigatse (poetically called by China as the 'closest stretch of railway to the sky') will be open to traffic in August.
In my yesterday's posting, I mentioned that the construction of the 254 kilometers line began in September 2010.
The new  extension of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway will have 13 stations between Lhasa and Shigatse,
According to Yang Yulin, deputy director of the railway office of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) government, it is the largest infrastructure project (in Tibet) during the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015) with an investment of more than $1.7 billion.
Zhu Bin, a manager with a mineral company based in Lhasa told The People's Daily that "It will accelerate transportation of the mineral products, which could only be transmitted through highways that often risk being cut off during rainy seasons or see vehicle turnovers."
That is certainly one of the objectives of the train.
A Tibetan writer based in Lhasa, told the Communist newspaper that the railway will help local Tibetans to 'exchange with the outside world' and ...'tourists will be attracted to the area'.
It is clear that China is not investing 1.7 billion US $ for the Tibetans to 'see the outside world'.
The train to Shigatse has 3 basic purposes, one, to bring more tourists, the TAR's main source of revenue; two, to take away minerals to the mainland to feed the economic machine and three, to 'strengthen' the borders with India by allowing quick movement of troops and armament.
Now, more surprising, Yang announced that during the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) period, the construction of a railway connecting Shigatse with Gyirong (Kyirong) in northern Nepal and with Yatung, in the Chumbi Valley between India and Bhutan, will start.
Kyirong is a logical extension of the line as China has extensively invested in this landport to make it the main link between Tibet and Nepal, but why Yatung?
The border trade between India and Tibet is minimal as I showed in a research paper last year.
Wang Chunhuan, professor at the Tibetan Academy of Social Sciences in Lhasa told The Global Times that the railway network in Tibet will play the role of continental bridge in South Asia and promote economic and cultural exchanges.
Does it mean that China woud like to open the Yatung-Nathula-Gangtok route in a big way?
Has Beijing consulted Delhi on this or is it a unilateral decision? 
The Global Times quotes Liu Zongyi, an 'expert' on India, working for the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies, saying that the "Indian authorities would certainly care about the operation of the Lhasa-Shigatse Railway that is very close to the disputed area [Arunachal?]. The Indians have lately been working on adding infrastructure in the South Tibet region, in order to strengthen control."
'Southern Tibet' is the Chinese name for 'Arunachal'!!

Liu explains that it is a bargaining chip.
If people on the Chinese side of South Tibet region (Arunachal) see better economic development in southwestern Tibet (Shigatse and Ngari) they will be tempted to join the People's Republic.
This is of course a Chinese Dream.
But the move towards Yatung is indeed a bargaining chip at another level.
Liu admits: "The growing railway network will increase Chinese activities in this area, balancing Indian moves."
China is nervous about the raising a 'mountain strike corps', XVII Corps, with its headquarters at Panagarh in West Bengal, not too far from Sikkim (and Yatung).
When fully operational (by 2018-2019), the Corps, costing some Rs 64,678 crore to the Indian tax-payers, will have 90,274 troops.
The Corps which will be spread on the 4,057-km Line of Actual Control (LAC) from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh; it will have two high-altitude infantry divisions (59 Div at Panagarh and 72 Div at Pathankot) with their integral units, two independent infantry brigades, two armoured brigades.
It will also include 30 new infantry battalions and two Para-Special Forces battalions.
Incidentally, the projected railway line to Yatung perhaps explains the inflated size of the Chumbi Valley in the newly published Chinese maps. Huge chunks of Bhutanese territory have been engulfed in the Chumbi Valley. 

It is a fact that XVII Corps makes China nervous.
China will not certainly not invest billions of dollars to built "a continental bridge in South Asia and promote economic and cultural exchanges", but balancing the developments on the Indian side, is worth a few billions dollars.
On the Indian side, the government is said to have cleared the construction of four militarily strategic railway lines in the Himalayas; 3 of them are in Arunachal Pradesh and one, to Leh in Jammu and Kashmir.
According to the Free Press Journal, the new rail lines will enable rapid deployment and movement of forces across the rugged, inhospitable and mostly snow-bound terrains. This is India’s first foray in the upper Himalayas to match the railway lines built by China connecting almost all areas on its side of the LAC.
The construction is expected to begin next year, though land acquisition and preparation of the detail project reports will be done during this financial year.
Also important to India, the railway linking Lhasa to Nyingchi Prefecture, located north of the McMahon Line, which is expected to start in a few months. It is also part of the 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-2020).
India should watch and act fast.